add initial articles

_config.yml

@@ -17,15 +17,15 @@
 # You'll be able to call these different parameters via {{ site.yourparam }} (e.g. {{ site.title }} to retrieve the title of you site on any of your page).
 # You can add to this list any new parameter you wish, and access it anywhere in the templates.
 
-title: "A site made with Simply Cyan" # The site title
+title: "Dan Maung" # The site title
 lang: en-GB # The site language
 encoding: utf-8
-description: "An amazing website" # The description of the site
+description: "The personal blog of Dan Maung" # The description of the site
 copyright: "© It belongs to me." # The mentions that appear in the site's footer
 url: "" # The base hostname for you site, e.g. http://mysite.com
 baseurl: "/simply-cyan-theme" # The subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
 repo:
-email: [email protected] # The owner's email
+email: [email protected] # The owner's email
 # google_analytics: ""
 # google_analytics_anonymize_ip: ""
 

_posts/2022-02-13-balanced-overtime.markdown

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+---
+author: Daniel Gibbons
+title: "Improving work-life balance"
+---
+
+# Intro
+
+Depending on your job and your personality, working a little overtime might actually be a net positive to your mental health and life quality overall. You owe it to yourself to experiment with your hours, but how do you make sure you find a balance that works for you without the (rather obvious) drawbacks of too much overtime?
+
+It's a good question, and it's something I've got better during my career as a software engineer. Here's the ways I've tried to approach it in the past, and my current **balanced overtime** system that leaves me doing my best work when I feel like it with the freedom to enjoy what I love outside of work.
+
+# Too cold: No overtime
+
+Back when I was starting out at my first software engineering job, I was adamant not to work any overtime. I had read endless articles about people burning out in software engineering. I wanted to start my career with discipline and built good habits, so I could create an amazing work-life balance for years to come.
+
+Every day at 5:30, I'd clock out and head home, no matter what was going on at work. At most I'd work ten to fifteen minutes longer, and that would always mean I'd be finishing 10-15 minutes early the day after.
+
+I call this approach **no overtime** (no points for guessing why), and it's quite simple:
+- Get all your work done during your workday.
+- Work _hard_ for all of your workday.
+- Knowing you did a good days work, relax until tomorrow.
+
+While I still think having a good work/life balance is important, this strict approach was not always healthy, and sometimes ended up causing me a few problems:
+1. **When I was unproductive at work, I'd get stressed.** Negative thoughts would play out in my head, "Why can I not work? I'm wasting time, I need to get something done or I won't feel good when I get home" .
+ 2. **When there were busy periods at work, I'd get stressed.**  I'd be eating dinner, thinking about the work I'd have to do the next day. Hardly the work/life balance panacea I was looking for. 🤦
+
+This is not to say I did not get a lot done, or felt terrible all the time. Most weeks I was perfectly happy and productive, and I loved my job. However, these little bits of friction caused me to search for a better approach.
+
+# Too hot: Unlimited overtime
+
+In my second job, I decided to throw my rule out the window and see what happened. In the first few months I found myself pouring a lot of my evenings into work with the hopes of getting the hang of things faster, and making a big impact.
+
+I experienced a bunch of benefits by working overtime. I'd often feel less stressed if I got a good piece of work done in the evening, leaving me a lot calmer and sleeping better. I'd also be able to get into the zone due to a lack of distractions. Lastly, I actually found myself enjoying releasing lots of exciting features. Good for me, and good for our team!
+
+However, I'm a person who values their free time for hobbies, self development, and relationships. I could feel my pace was unsustainable. It was chipping away at my morale, interfering with other areas of my life, and even starting to make the hours I was working less productive.
+
+Working with my manager I decided to try make one more tweak, and came up with an approach that combines the best of both worlds.
+
+# Just right: Balanced overtime
+
+What I've found worked best for me in my current role is a pretty simple system:
+1. I track all long sessions worked outside of normal hours in an "overtime bank".
+2. If I'm having a really unproductive session, I cut myself some slack, make a cup of tea, and subtract that time from the overtime bank.
+3. If the bank grows too large (5-10 hours) I take the opportunity to raise it with my manager.
+
+Doing things this way had some really positive effects:
+
+ 1. I'd no longer feel bad when I worked extra hours, because I felt it would come back to me on those days when my energy was low.
+ 2. I stopped feeling guilty if I'd not made enough progress during the work day. If I had the time I could always attack the problem in the evening without sacrificing my work life balance.
+ 3. I procrastinated less, as I knew that time would come out of my banked time.
+
+It's not a huge change, but this small system has contributed to me procrastinating less, feeling less guilty about taking breaks, and not beating myself up for working overtime when I want to.
+
+# Conclusion
+
+Not every day has to be a nine-to-five, and it's worth trying different strategies and schedules to try and find what works best. Work with your manager openly and honestly to try and find the best performace you can maintain over the long term that maintains your personal happiness, because at the end of the day, that's what everyone wants! If you're looking for a place to start, I'd suggest my current strategy of **balanced overtime**. Discuss with your manager, try it out, and see if it works for you. 🙂

_posts/2022-03-11-indie-hacker-journey.md

@@ -0,0 +1,82 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "My indie hacker journey"
+---
+
+Title says it all really! After falling in love with the idea of indie hacking and creating a few small projects, I have paused being an indie hacker to focus on other things in my life.
+
+Rather than feeling like I've somehow given up on "the dream", this decision has been a painless and positive one, and I wanted to share why.
+
+You see a lot of amazing success stories about indie hacking, and a few scary failure stories. I'm hoping that this kind of "average guy" story helps round out the picture a little, and helps with the problem of Survivorship bias. It's the kind of perspective I'd have wanted to see if I was me a year ago.
+
+First, a lightning quick rundown of my projects, none of which got more than ten users (hi Mum!).
+
+### Zenkettle - a Zettelkasten style note-taking app
+I decided to make a note-taking app (how cliché). It was based on the now popular zettelkasten style of note-taking, where you can form a rich network of ideas and connected concepts.
+
+I told myself that it was to learn new programming techniques, but in the back of my head I dreamed about making it big and having tonnes of paying users. I did zero customer validation, zero market analysis, and never even released the app.
+
+I did however learn that I can create something cool on my own, and that I don't hate the process.
+
+### BjjGymFinder - find BJJ gyms in your country
+
+When going on holiday I found it very time consuming locating Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gyms. Their websites are often missing pricing, out of date, and not written in English. My aggregator site kept all the basic data (timetable, cost, contact details) in one easy place, and was easy to search by city and country.
+
+This time I wanted to actually ship something. I still had no business model, but at least I was scratching my own itch and keeping the scope small. I started by adding all the gyms in London and Poznań (I was going to Poland at the time). 
+
+It barely got traffic (like 20 organic views, and 100 impressions). Not quite enough to slap some ads on and leave the day job... This was maybe because it was built bang in the middle of the covid lockdown, and flights were banned to almost every country. I decided to pull the plug and try something else.
+
+### Sell by weight - zero waste store plugin
+
+Getting slightly smarter, I picked a market and a niche! Zero waste stores who were driven online during covid had pretty bad websites. I decided to build a plugin that could solve (what I thought at the time) was a real pain for them.
+
+I was going to create a slider plugin for Shopify stores to let people sell by the gram. One of the best things about zero-waste is that you can cut down your spending by only buying the exact quantities of ingredients. However, most online store builders don't let you do this. Zero waste stores were having to sell in 50g batches.
+
+It took me five hours to build out an MVP (two weeks of real time on a busy schedule). I then contacted store owners, pitching the idea and asking for feedback/payment. I got tonnes of feedback, but nobody was interested.
+
+Turns out, most zero waste stores actually liked having 50 gram increments as it lets them pre-package batches of ingredients for delivery without weighing them on request! So much for reducing waste...
+
+Another valuable lesson about validation, another discontinued project.
+
+## Deciding to stop
+
+In my own mind, none of these unsuccessful products were big failures in the grand scheme of things. During each one I learned something new, and got a little closer to creating a solo project that generated income.
+
+So why did I decide to stop? There were two reasons:
+1. A big new life project that requires huge amounts of time
+2. I found ways to get what I wanted from indie hacking out of my day job.
+
+### Big project: Learning a language
+
+At the same time as I started indie hacking, I started learning Polish very seriously. My wife and her family are Polish, and I wanted to be able to communicate with them in their first language.
+
+The method I found (Comprehensible input) was quite unlike any I'd tried before. It requires that you consume a lot of content in the language (3 hours a day minimum), and let your brain's language learning mechanisms do the bulk of the work. I found huge progress unlike anything I'd experienced dabbling in language learning with Duolingo, and made the decision to keep at it until fluency.
+
+This however meant that my hour before work, lunch break, and hour before bed were now needed to meet my daily immersion time, and I found myself with only 1-2 hours a week to work on side projects. I decided it was best to take a break from indie hacking, at least for three years, maybe more.
+
+### Changing my job
+
+I wanted to become an indie hacker to:
+- earn more money
+- become location independent
+- become financially independent (work less)
+
+In order to fulfill those same goals while learning Polish, I was lucky enough to find a remote job with a higher salary. I also learned about the financial independence movement and started saving more aggressively.
+
+My new work has good work life balance. Not quite the 20 hour work week I dreamed of, but no crazy overtime. More importantly for me, it was a salary increase, and has allowed me to travel. I'm writing this article in a coffee shop in Porto!
+
+As the first employee in a self funded SAAS business, I also have had the privilege of helping us grow from 0 customers to over £3000 MRR in the last eight months. Needless to say, I'm taking notes about what works and what does not.
+
+Due to saving more, I'm also still on my path towards financial independence. When I do start working on solo projects again I'll do it knowing that a big chunk of money required for my ideal lifestyle has already been saved away.
+
+## When all is said and done
+
+I feel that I'm still on the same journey, but I've slowed down due to shifting priorities. I could maybe buckle down and grind, but I have decided that's not for me. I like my life now, and I want to use my time to take advantage of different opportunities that contribute towards my overall happiness (which is what this should be all about in the end).
+
+I have time for my hobbies, I'm valued at work, and I'm growing my income. At the same time I'm I'm building skills and a safety net that'll make my journey easier if/when I choose to go back into indie hacking more seriously. I'm also over two thousand hours into learning Polish, and I'd not trade the conversations I've had with my new grandfather and grandmother for the world.
+
+This is not a success story, or a failure story really. I just hope it's been useful to hear a somewhat un-inspiring story about someone who fell in love with the idea of indie hacking, but chose to put it down for now to focus on other things. 🙂
+
+In survivorship terms, I'm one of those planes that did not make it back. I've not been shot down though, I just disappeared into the sunset.
+
+Happy hacking, and wishing you all the best, regardless of where your journey takes you!